Information Age

• 1. Introduction

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  The Information Age began in the mid-20th century, and one date sits at its root. In 1947, John Bardeen and Walter Houser Brattain built the first working transistor at Bell Labs, working under William Shockley. That germanium-based point-contact device was small, but it pointed toward something vast. Within a few short decades, an economy built on traditional industry gave way to one centered on information technology. The change moved faster than any transformation before it. The Neolithic shift took thousands of years. The Information Age swept across the globe in a matter of years.

  This is a story of how copies became perfect, how light learned to carry data, and how the world's machines came to out-think a single human brain. It asks what happened when newspapers, radio, and vinyl records gave way to digital signals. It looks at how the transistor became a microprocessor, how a message on the ARPANET in 1969 grew into a network of networks, and how households went from owning almost no computers to owning nearly all of them. It also asks a harder question. When access to information has never been greater, what becomes of expertise?

• 2. The Digital Turn

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  The digital revolution converted technology from analog format to digital format. The payoff was a strange kind of perfection. A copy could now be identical to the original. In digital communications, repeating hardware could amplify a signal and pass it on with no loss of information at all. That mattered as much as the copies themselves. Digital information could be moved easily between media, and it could be accessed or distributed from a distance.

  During the 1980s, this turn reached people's living rooms through music. The digital format of optical compact discs gradually replaced vinyl records and cassette tapes as the popular medium of choice. Compute! magazine looked further ahead and predicted that CD-ROM would be the centerpiece of the revolution, with multiple household devices reading the discs.

  The numbers behind this shift are stark. In the late 1980s, less than 1% of the world's technologically stored information was in digital format. By 2007, that figure had climbed to 94%, and by 2014 it passed 99%. The world's capacity to store information grew from 2.6 exabytes in 1986 to roughly 5,000 exabytes, or 5 zettabytes, in 2014. That later figure was described as the equivalent of 4,500 stacks of printed books reaching from the earth to the sun.

• 3. Before The Transistor

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  Humans have built tools for counting since ancient times, including the abacus, the astrolabe, and the equatorium. More complicated devices appeared in the 1600s, among them the slide rule and mechanical calculators. By the early 1800s, the Industrial Revolution had produced mass-market calculators like the arithmometer, along with the punch card. Charles Babbage proposed a mechanical general-purpose computer, the Analytical Engine, but it was never successfully built. By the 20th century it was largely forgotten, and unknown to most inventors of modern computers.

  In the 1880s, Herman Hollerith developed electromechanical tabulating and calculating devices using punch cards and unit record equipment. These spread widely through business and government. Alongside them ran a parallel tradition of analog machines that modeled problems physically. An 1872 tide-predicting machine, differential analysers, and the Deltar for water management in the Netherlands all calculated answers through electrical, mechanical, or hydraulic means.

  The last electromechanical giants arrived during World War II. In 1941, German inventor Konrad Zuse completed the Z3, described as the world's first working programmable, fully automatic digital computer. Allied engineers built electromechanical bombes to break the German Enigma machine encoding. The base-10 Harvard Mark I was completed in 1944, improved in part by inspiration from Babbage's designs.

• 4. From Chip To Microprocessor

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  Claude Shannon, a Bell Labs mathematician, is generally credited with laying the foundations of digitalization. He did so in his pioneering 1948 article, A Mathematical Theory of Communication. That same year, Bardeen and Brattain patented an insulated-gate transistor with an inversion layer, a concept that forms the basis of CMOS and DRAM technology today.

  The integrated circuit followed in stages, each tied to a name. Jack Kilby reached the first integrated circuit milestone in 1958. Robert Noyce invented the monolithic integrated circuit chip at Fairchild Semiconductor in 1959, made possible by the planar process developed by Jean Hoerni. In 1963, complementary MOS, or CMOS, was developed by Chih-Tang Sah and Frank Wanlass, also at Fairchild Semiconductor.

  MOS chips reached higher transistor density and lower manufacturing costs than bipolar circuits by 1964. Complexity then grew at a rate predicted by Moore's law, reaching hundreds of transistors on a single chip by the late 1960s. In 1968, Fairchild engineer Federico Faggin developed the silicon-gate MOS chip. He later used it to build the Intel 4004, the first single-chip microprocessor, released by Intel in 1971. That chip laid the foundations for the microcomputer revolution of the 1970s.

• 5. Networks And Home Machines

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  The public was first introduced to the concepts behind the Internet in 1969, when a message was sent over the ARPANET. Packet switched networks such as ARPANET, CYCLADES, Tymnet, and Telenet emerged in the late 1960s and early 1970s using a variety of protocols. ARPANET in particular led to protocols for internetworking, in which separate networks could be joined into a network of networks.

  The 1970s brought computing into the home and the arcade. The home computer arrived, along with the video game console and the golden age of arcade video games, which began with Space Invaders. A relatively new job appeared as well, the data entry clerk, drawn from the ranks of secretaries and typists and tasked with converting analog records into digital data.

  In developed nations, computers achieved semi-ubiquity during the 1980s, entering schools, homes, businesses, and industry. Early manufacturers such as Apple, Commodore, and Tandy became household names. The Commodore 64 is often cited as the best-selling computer of all time, having sold 17 million units by some accounts between 1982 and 1994. The first mobile phone, the Motorola DynaTac, arrived in 1983, but it used analog communication. Digital cell phones were not sold commercially until 1991, when the 2G network began opening in Finland.

• 6. The Web Reaches Everyone

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  Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web in 1989. It became publicly accessible in 1991, having previously been available only to government and universities. In 1993, Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina introduced Mosaic, the first web browser capable of displaying inline images. Mosaic became the basis for later browsers such as Netscape Navigator and Internet Explorer.

  Banking and broadcasting changed with it. Stanford Federal Credit Union became the first financial institution to offer online internet banking to all its members in October 1994. In 1996, OP Financial Group became the second online bank in the world and the first in Europe. The first public digital HDTV broadcast was of the 1990 FIFA World Cup that June, shown in 10 theaters in Spain and Italy.

  Adoption climbed steeply through these years. By 1996 the Internet was part of mass culture, with businesses listing websites in their ads. By 1999, nearly every country had a connection, and almost half of Americans used the internet regularly. In late 2005 the number of people with internet access reached 1 billion, and 3 billion people worldwide used cell phones by the end of the decade. By 2016 half the world was connected, and by 2020 that figure had risen to 67%.

• 7. Light And Genetic Code

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  Beginning in 1972, engineers devised ways to harness light to convey data through fiber optic cable. This new form of power dramatically accelerated the pace of adoption. Today, light-based optical networking systems sit at the heart of telecom networks and the Internet, carrying most of the information traffic to and from users and data storage systems. The groundwork came earlier. In 1953, Harold Hopkins and Narinder Singh Kapany at Imperial College made image-transmitting bundles with over 10,000 optical fibers. By 2018, optical networks routinely delivered 30.4 terabits per second over a fiber optic pair, the data equivalent of 1.2 million simultaneous 4K HD video streams.

  Genetic code can also be considered part of the information revolution. Once sequencing was computerized, the genome could be rendered and manipulated as data. This started with DNA sequencing, invented by Walter Gilbert and Allan Maxam in 1976 to 1977 and by Frederick Sanger in 1977.

  The scale of that data is its own story. Sequence data in GenBank grew from 606 genome sequences registered in December 1982 to 231 million genomes in August 2021. An additional 13 trillion incomplete sequences were registered in the Whole Genome Shotgun database as of August 2021. The information in these registered sequences has doubled every 18 months.

• 8. Work And Anti-Intellectualism

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  From January 1972 to August 2010, the number of people employed in manufacturing jobs in the United States fell from 17,500,000 to 11,500,000, while manufacturing value rose 270%. Automation and computerization had delivered higher productivity coupled with net job loss in manufacturing. Workers now had to compete in a global job market, where wages depend less on the success or failure of individual economies.

  The classical model held that investments in human and financial capital predict the performance of a new venture. Yet as demonstrated by Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook, it now seems possible for a group of relatively inexperienced people with limited capital to succeed on a large scale. Industry had become more information-intensive while less labor- and capital-intensive.

  Manuel Castells, who authored The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture, called this moment the beginning of a new existence, a new society-in-the-making marked by the autonomy of culture. Thomas Chatterton Williams offered a sharper warning. Writing for The Atlantic, he argued that the age's emphasis on speed over expertise contributes to a superficial culture, one in which even the elite will openly disparage as pointless our main repositories for the very best that has been thought. The question of what we do with so much information, and so little patience for it, is one the Information Age has not yet answered.